This post contains outdated information regarding the yuzu and Citra emulators. This post contains outdated information regarding the yuzu and Citra emulators.
If you've clicked around my website, you'll know that I'm probably the biggest Nintendo geek there is. I have so much Mario and Zelda merch, it isn't even funny; to say nothing of the games. For about 20 years there, I had every Nintendo console and every Mario and Zelda game. So, I'm not just some Xbox stan coming in and idly wishing death upon my preferred system's main competitor. As this whole Citra/yuzu/Emuparadise debacle has shown, Nintendo is a doddering old fogey, sitting on the park bench and hitting passers-by with its cane. When it comes to new and compelling games from them? There aren't any. They, along with Microsoft and Valve, leave the new ideas to indie developers while they sit back, wait for the numbers to come in, and either kick them off NSO or acquire the whole company.
Let's talk about Super Mario 3D All-Stars for a moment, shall we? When I heard that Nintendo was going to re-release 2 of my favourite games for Switch; naturally, my first thought was that they were going to use character models from Super Mario Odyssey or 3D World and redraw things where necessary, like they did back in 1993 when they remade Super Mario Bros.
Instead, what happened was, they got a few interns together, pretended to upscale the graphics using AI, patched in all the improvements on the fly, and just emulated Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, and Super Mario Galaxy from ripped ROMs. If you remove the ISO images from the game and run them in a common emulator, you'll find stock condition Super Mario 64 Shindou Pak Taiou and Super Mario Sunshine. Or, nearly stock, anyway, with some minor changes to options, and of course the lack of motion controls in Super Mario Galaxy (though they forgot to remove most of the star bits that you could only pick up with the Wii Remote). The entire project was done on the cheap, then made artificially scarce so as to scare people into rushing away and buying it immediately. It was nothing more than a failed publicity stunt by a failing company.
Then, of course, we have all the remakes that they've done in the intervening time. Why bother remaking Link's Awakening, Skyward Sword, Super Mario RPG, and Mario vs. Donkey Kong except that you aren't willing to invest in new ideas and only want to look back at old ones? It's like I said before: if Nintendo spent half as much money on making games as it does on lawsuits, it would be in profit within a fiscal year. But, it goes back to end-stage capitalism, really, doesn't it? All across the board, you won't find anyone willing to take any sort of risk; everyone wants to make loads of money without spending anything, so they default to old "can't-lose" propositions that have been losing for the past 3 years.
Well... there is one other way that companies are making money: by making people buy twice or more. The thing that finally made me lose all the respect for Nintendo that I had left was Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack. In order to access crappy emulations of Sega Mega Drive and Nintendo 64, you have to buy 4 times: first, you need to buy the console. Understandable; you can't play games for a particular platform unless you actually have it. Second, you need to subscribe to Nintendo Switch Online. Ouch; but, I guess subscription delivery services are things that exist now. Third; you have to subscribe to the Expansion Pack. What the actual hell? Subscribe once to get into the service, then subscribe again to get into another service on the same platform? Fourth; you have to buy the actual software. No. Unforgiveable. Unconscionable. Nintendo genuinely expects people to subscribe to a service twice just for the privilege of buying a yearly license to a piece of software and not turn to emulation when they can't afford that, plus all the other streaming services they're subscribed to.
I was researching availability for the 15 Essential Games series and made the startling discovery that most of the games on those lists simply cannot be found anywhere except No-Intro and Redump. While Nintendo had GameCube games available for Wii U Virtual Console, that was stopped when the Switch was released. Nintendo has abandoned not only the entire DS line, but also the GameCube, the Wii, and the Wii U, to say nothing of the piles and piles of games for Game Boy Advance and older systems that they're simply never going to release again. This amounts to at least 10,000 games, and they have the audacity to scream and whinge and complain when someone hosts those games on a website? No. Wrong. If you're going to make a scene about people playing Super Mario 3D Land on their computers, you'd better have some way available to play that game without an emulator. But there isn't one. The only options until yesterday were jailbreaking a 3DS or emulating it on Citra. Today, the only option is jailbreaking a 3DS. If Nintendo comes for Dolphin next, I will make it my personal mission to get everyone in this city to cancel their NSO+EP subscriptions and throw their Nintendo Switch consoles into a vat of industrial abrasives, then get a refurbished computer on their desk and a hard drive full of emulators and games, even if I have to provide them all myself. Also, I hope Dolphin's developers will be a bit more considerate of their own rights, afforded them under Sega v. Accolade and Sony v. Bleem. The developers of yuzu rolled over too easily; they had the opportunity to do what Atari wanted to do in the '90s and could not: prove Nintendo is a bad-faith actor operating a mafia. It probably would have cost about the same as their $2,400,000 settlement. Oh well, one of these days, Nintendo will piss off the wrong emulator developer and it'll lead to that.
Nintendo is just like every other media company; for a number of reasons, but in this case specifically because they treat media preservation and media piracy as the same thing. For the most part, the world's legal systems tend to go along with it, since it's not possible to statutorially define a difference between archiving for the sake of piracy and for the sake of preservation. Maybe. Perhaps nobody has ever tried it. But the fact is that Nintendo is able to use their vulgar wealth to keep impressive-sounding law firms on retainer and then sic them on unsuspecting people like a pack of hunting hounds, banking on the fact that their target is too impoverished to mount any sort of defence. What Nintendo, Warner, Disney, Universal, and everyone else who used to make physical copies of media don't want to acknowledge is that physical media is fallible. There is no such thing as a hundred-year medium in the digital or analogue ages unless you never, ever touch it or put it into a player. Cartridge pins come off the board, diskettes get demagnetised, tapes warp, discs get scratched or cloudy. The only way to keep media playable is by creating digital backups of them. I just said there's no such thing as a hundred-year medium in the digital age; there doesn't need to be as long as enough computers have this data on them. Admittedly, there's a lot of this process that is indistinguishable from piracy; both pirates and archivists need to remove the content from its original delivery medium, both need to store the resulting digital files on a computer, and both tend to establish online archives of the files they have, allowing others to add to it and download from it. The only thing that separates piracy from preservation is what the recipient does with that data: do they keep a personal archive of media that they own physical copies of? Do they have a piratey pillage through it, grabbing up things that look cool that would otherwise cost money to access? Or, do they fill their hoards with things that have no digital copies available from any other source?
There's a test I call the Broad Daylight principle. As in, can you do this in broad daylight without anyone accusing you of crime? It can be illustrated with a flowchart.
Essentially, it states that downloading is archiving if you own a physical copy of the media you download, or if it isn't available from any legitimate DLC service. However, if you download something that is available from a DLC service, it's piracy. I personally hold that an extenuating circumstance exists if you haven't got enough money to pay what the corporation demands for access; in that case, it's no different than shopping around for a different service to perform the same function. Look at it this way: you could either pay a professional lawncare service to come and mow your lawn, or you could ask your brother-in-law to use his ride-on mower, and he does it for free. Of course, that bit is more of a personal belief than anything with legal precedent to back it up, mostly because no one has ever attempted to argue this point in court before. That's why huge corporations tend only to sue regular people, because they would rather not risk the court siding with a defendant arguing this point, which would require them all to reconsider their "infinite profits" model.
Let's earnestly talk about piracy for a minute. What would constitute piracy under the law that Nintendo or the national police could come after you for? Very little, actually. The only way you personally would ever enter anyone's field of vision as a media pirate is if you redistribute the media that you have. Frankly, the national spy agencies are buried under data as it is; the US government in particular, in demanding everybody's data regardless of who they are or where they live, have petabytes of data dumped onto them every single day. Do you know just how much data a human being generates everyday? Since they've been doing this every single day since 2001, it's not an exaggeration to say that they have a backlog of hundreds, possibly thousands, of exabytes at least— and there's no AI process, generative or otherwise, that is capable of parsing through that much data. As a result, they have to pick and choose what information they pay attention to, and there are a lot more threatening targets than some rando from the sticks, torrenting Nintendo Switch ROMs.
Thus far, a widescale crackdown on emulation like the RIAA witch-hunts from the turn of the millennium simply has not occurred. In that case, the RIAA spent a lot of money and got very little back for their effort, since they discovered in short order that regular people simply don't have the millions that they were demanding. Shareholders are not going to accept an expensive plan to stop all emulation everywhere all at once, so the corporations, as Nintendo did with The ISO Zone and Emuparadise, will go after the people who operate the servers where the ROMs are stored and pretend it sends a message. The only message it sends is "better find a new website". The loss of Emuparadise was a shock, but certainly not a blow to emulation. The loss of yuzu was similarly a shock, but mirrors of their project site emerged the same hour as the official one was shut down. Nintendo simply does not have the resources to continually play Whac-a-Mole with emulationists. If you were to go out right now and download Nestopia, Snes9x, Project64, VisualBoyAdvance-M, Dolphin, Cemu, and the mirrors of Citra and yuzu, then go off to Vimm's and download Nintendo's entire back catalogue, and then sit on that datahoard until you die, Nintendo are not going to bother coming after you. In all likelihood, they'll never even know it happened. However, if you do all that and then start a website "comedownloadnintendoshit.eggsalad.rom" and make that entire datahoard available for free download, then Nintendo will come after you; assuming they know your website exists.
I guess the point of this long and rambling post is this. Nintendo have demonstrated that they regard all their customers as potential criminals. They demand exorbitant fees to be paid for access to games that are middling quality at best, expect their customers pay out the nose and then some for access to 25+ year old games, have abandoned most of their back catalogue yet also demand that no one dare attempt to access it by other means, fire off lawsuits left and right for no real reason other than they're wealthy and they want to look better than Sony and Microsoft at the conventions, and have interpreted "customer loyalty" to mean "buying Super Mario Bros. thirteen times". They shut down websites, end esports conventions, destroy livelihoods, and absorb the careers of their employees. We're long past the "moral" course of action being to pirate Nintendo products; it should be the default action at this point. You should see the word "Nintendo" and think "Where can I get this online for free?"
--6 March 2024--